Summary

"This is what every writer longs for: a debut of intense invention, with language at a height and experience at a depth that the whole art suddenly appears as a plinth on the plain of American letters". -- Molly Peacock

Summary

A collection of poems which reflect a range of themes, such as loss, survival, the memory and body as it is born and ages, and the boundaries of human spirit.

Publisher's Weekly Review

Rabinowitz's skillful debut collection was selected by the publisher as the winner of its 1996 Juniper Prize. Working with a wide array of formal resources, Rabinowitz is strongest when she examines (and re-examines) such subjects of human experience as gender, aging and the significance of things ordinary and extraordinary. She employs strings of deft, declarative sentences, as in "Lost and Found": "The fact is the child did not need to learn about loss./ No one left because no one came./ When she wanted company, two ghosts/ posed in a yellowed, deckle-edged/ sepia blur spoke to her from a life/ she knew nothing of." Other poems use lists to evoke personality. In "Mixed Media," the poet lists the contents of her dead father's collections: "From drawers, pockets, from, the corners/ of deeds, he gathered fistfuls of Cracker Jack charms,/ bobbins, cloud-flecked marbles, the core of an apple,/ Five and Dime rings, a nosegay of needles." An elegant paean for marginalia, "Anthem" offers line after line of praise for: "threadbare rugs, unknotted tufts, loop and cut pile murals shunted/ from warp and weft to bear witness in the yard sales of round after/ noons." While Rabinowitz ventures into many formal thickets in this volume, it is in such litanies that she hits her most powerful stride, setting a foreground teeming with the specificity of daily life against a more blurry background of human longing and emotion. (May) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved

Publisher's Weekly Review

Rabinowitz's skillful debut collection was selected by the publisher as the winner of its 1996 Juniper Prize. Working with a wide array of formal resources, Rabinowitz is strongest when she examines (and re-examines) such subjects of human experience as gender, aging and the significance of things ordinary and extraordinary. She employs strings of deft, declarative sentences, as in "Lost and Found": "The fact is the child did not need to learn about loss./ No one left because no one came./ When she wanted company, two ghosts/ posed in a yellowed, deckle-edged/ sepia blur spoke to her from a life/ she knew nothing of." Other poems use lists to evoke personality. In "Mixed Media," the poet lists the contents of her dead father's collections: "From drawers, pockets, from, the corners/ of deeds, he gathered fistfuls of Cracker Jack charms,/ bobbins, cloud-flecked marbles, the core of an apple,/ Five and Dime rings, a nosegay of needles." An elegant paean for marginalia, "Anthem" offers line after line of praise for: "threadbare rugs, unknotted tufts, loop and cut pile murals shunted/ from warp and weft to bear witness in the yard sales of round after/ noons." While Rabinowitz ventures into many formal thickets in this volume, it is in such litanies that she hits her most powerful stride, setting a foreground teeming with the specificity of daily life against a more blurry background of human longing and emotion. (May) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved